Actually, since this isn’t Cafe Society I was more interested in the premise as it was first described and its application in real life, and not the developing show itself.
No, although there are one or two cases where mutineers were allowed to keep their (merchant, privately owned) vessels under salvage lwas. I’ll see if I can find a case.
Pitcairn Island? Not sovereign now but I’m figuring it easily could have been so.
The point is, there isn’t a checklist of criteria and if you check each box, then BAM you’re a country.
You’re only an independent country if other countries agree to act as if you are an independent country. If they don’t agree, then you’re not. There’s nothing stopping you from declaring your private zeppelin an independent country, except that no one from the US state department will go along with your plan, and neither will the foreign ministries of any other country.
Countries only exist because people act as if they exist. If nobody else will act as if your country exists, then it doesn’t exist.
Sure, but how do you think other countries determine whether to recognize your state? They do it by checking off the four criteria I mentioned above, and then determining whether any other countries will get pissy about you recognizing the new one.
Pitcairn is actually a good example. The crew had a functioning colony for several years before they were found. Of course, they were hiding on a tiny island in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere. Our sub crew that took over a NATO outpost is going to get noticed much quicker than that.
Canada did it!
The OP may be interested in this wiki article. One of the first things they teach in PoliSci courses is that international law is whatever nations say it is. And a nation is whatever other nations say it is. Because there are no overruling authorities, when talking about making countries, it’s a jungle out there. So really, to be a country, you just have to get others to act as if you are a country.
It’s interesting to note that the concept of a modern nation-state only goes back to 1648. Before that, there weren’t countries so much as there were “lands” belonging to this or that warlord, i.e. king.
Even today, we have places that some people consider countries and others don’t, like Palestine, Tibet, Taiwan, or South Sudan.
No, it doesn’t. The Peace of Westphalia is notable because it established fixed borders for a bunch of nation-states that already existed, not because it created the concept. It’s a handy reference point, but mostly a massive oversimplification.
Found what I was looking for. The Montevideo Convention [on the rights and duties of states] of 1933:
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Interesting but not definitive. The only signatories to that were in the Americas.
It’s definitive. At the time, it was just a multilateral treaty between the signatory states but now it’s jus cogens- a restatement of customary international law. See here, for example.
Sounds like a situation that the crew of HMS Troutbridge might have stumbled into! Good thing they didn’t have nukes!